


afterthought

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M, Post-Canon, What's The Opposite of a Fix-It Fic, offscreen relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-14 00:41:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13582374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: Post-TRK, and Noah has slid from time and everyone's memories. But Gansey keeps finding mentions of him, and doesn't know what they mean.





	afterthought

**Author's Note:**

> This is 100% tk's idea because I forgot that the gang forgot about Noah at the end of TRK because ??? why 
> 
> But anyway, it's all [telekinesiskid's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) idea and she was very patient in helping me execute it

It’s just a footnote. Gansey is checking the journal for something else, a co-ordinate, part of his latest project to catalogue his now-complete Glendower crusade and fill some of the unending hours. It’s funny that it even catches his eye, his off-hand scrawl on the corner of one page, ‘ _Noah suggests dowsing_.’

That’s all there is. Gansey tries to recall any authors who go by ‘Noah’ and can’t, and taps his thumb against his lower lip, wishing he could remember who he meant. It’s the kind of thing he usually has a good head for, but now his memory betrays him. He has a connection with that journal; he _knows_ what’s in it. The footnote is an incongruous exception.

He shrugs and moves on after a minute, but the name doesn’t leave him alone. It’s there, as often as ‘ _Blue_ ’ and ‘ _Adam_ ’ and ‘ _Ronan_ ’, little notes in the margins that carry such _presumption_ that Gansey will remember the context. Sometimes he’s as brief as ‘ _N. disappeared_ ’ and sometimes his notes are just odd: ‘ _Noah can use Ronan’s energy to stay manifest – devise alternate power source?_ ’

There is something about the name that is maybe tip-of-tongue familiar, but Gansey wracks his brain and comes up empty. A small mystery, maybe. God knows he could use one to keep him busy.

 

Adam sits on Gansey’s desk, his last true disciple now the adventuring is ended and the paperwork remains. Gansey, in the desk chair, swivels. “You’re sure you don’t remember?” Gansey asks him. “I have ‘Adam and Noah’ written all over the place.”

“It is… familiar,” Adam says. He picks up a paperweight, a beetle trapped in resin, sets it back down. “But nothing concrete. And if it’s all over the place, then I would remember.”

“I know,” Gansey sighs. He swings the chair to the left, watches Adam pick up his senselessly ornate penholder, and make a face before abandoning it. “I just can’t explain it. It’s in the journal, in my handwriting. And _don’t_ start, there’s no way that journal’s been – been tampered with.”

“It’s not like you were that careful. Blue had it for a while,” Adam says, but his voice lacks conviction. The fact of Gansey’s handwriting remains, and the peculiarity of the crime speaks for itself. Adam picks up a set of car keys that had been tucked behind the pen holder, asks, “Are these yours?”

Gansey blinks. They’re not his or Ronan’s. There’s a Mustang keychain attached, but Gansey only knows a small handful of people who drive Mustangs, and none have been into his home. “I don’t know. Do you?”

“Don’t they belong to –” Adam stops. He’d been speaking so automatically that he almost looks surprised to have stopped. “I don’t know. No one else would’ve left their keys here?”

Gansey shakes his head. “I suppose I’ll keep them, on the off-chance. One of Ronan’s creations, perhaps,” he says, but he doesn’t believe that really. He tucks them back on his desk, but doesn’t forget about them this time.

 

He knows he’s bored. He’s wiring LEDs to batteries to light up the windows of model Henrietta. He’s going to get a little raspberry pi in the miniature St Agnes, just to play a bell ring. He is probably going to burn himself on a soldering iron.

 

Gansey is almost surprised to remember he has a spare room; Monmouth is cluttered with so many of his books and impulse buys, the space is bizarrely underutilised.

The only thing in it is the leftover piece of machinery and a bed – a guest bed? He can’t imagine cramming anyone into this little space with its remnant machine and nothing else. Maybe Adam stayed once. Gansey remembers that, though he’s surprised he was conscientious enough to set up a spare bed just for that.

The thought occurs that he could have made this his bedroom, if he'd valued four walls and a closing door, but he can't imagine cooping himself up in such a small space. He’s relieved to shift some of the clutter from the main room into the odd little spare room though, stacking boxes up against the wall, fully aware that he’s just going to bring new things in until Monmouth’s floor is groaning.

He’s just thinking he’s done when a sparkle catches his eye; bending to look under the bed, he finds a snow globe, covered in only a light layer of dust. When he pulls it out and turns it over, glitter tumbles through the cheap little dome. He keeps tilting it while he examines it, nonplussed.

It seems unlikely that Adam left it there, and he knows it wasn’t there when he moved in. The way it catches the light is lovely. A strange and pointless little secret, Gansey carries it out with him and blows the dust off. Maybe it’s one of Ronan’s dreams, but its mystery endears it to Gansey regardless. It goes on his desk, and the sun hits it while the glitter’s still settling, casting little sparks of light throughout the room.

 

Part of shifting things into the spare room is an audit of the main room, which is how Gansey discovers that at some point he upgraded his stereo and bought a stack of Blink-182 albums. They’re not his, and he doubts they’re Ronan’s, but here they are in the middle of his apartment. Together with the keys and the snowglobe, Gansey is beginning to wonder, but he’s not willing to put it into words yet.

When Gansey puts one on, the music bursts out, fast and bright, and Ronan stops dead. A thunderstorm crosses briefly over his face, only passing when Gansey shuts the stereo off, and even then he looks furious in no particular direction. 

“Are these yours?” Gansey asks, not sure what answer he even expects.

“Not my thing.”

Gansey considers the stereo and the albums and the _look_ on Ronan’s face, and asks, “Do you know anyone by the name of Noah?”

Ronan’s teeth are bared in a snarl of _yes_ , but Gansey can see understanding slip right off his face the more he tries to think on it, and eventually Ronan says, “No,” though reluctance rolls across his tongue like thumbtacks.

“Are you sure?”

“No,” Ronan says, and his shoulders are up. Gansey knows that he has, in a way neither of them understand, ruined Ronan’s day. He is very apologetic, but Ronan stomps back into his own bedroom, and Gansey decides it’s best to leave the stereo alone.

 

There are five shadows.

Gansey tilts the photograph in case he’s blocking the light, but no; five shadows in the image, stretching out over Virginian scrub grass. He remembers that day. He remembers the heat the photograph cannot transmit, Ronan complaining loudly as he burned in his muscle tee, the constant tinkling of the bells hemming Blue’s dress, Adam torn between infatuation and irritation. They’re in the shot, Gansey took the picture, and a fifth shadow shimmers just on the edge, belonging to someone just out of frame.

Gansey remembers the day, but he does not remember a fifth person. His quest had always been open for anyone to join, but in the end it had been the four of them, three before Blue, five with Henry who had not been there at the time. Gansey thumbs his lip and flips through the journal, looking for notes on that particular expedition.

Of course he hadn’t written down who’d gone with him – because how could he possibly forget? – but there is another scrawl in the margin, another footnote, another mention of Noah who, this time, ‘ _warned of low energy before line flux_ ’.

Gansey stares at the shadow as though its blurry edge can tell him anything more. He’s starting to believe that there is either something wrong with his memory, or with the world, for him to have lost something _this big_. It’s easier to believe that the journal was tampered with. It’s easier to believe that Adam and Ronan are somehow conspiring against him.

He looks at the shadow until it’s imprinted in his retinas, until the shadow is looking back.

 

Gansey does not say out loud, but he is so glad to have a new ghost to chase. No one else says it out loud, but he knows they’re glad for him too.

 

He’s always sketched in the margins of his journals, as a way to keep himself focused, as a way to keep his mind ticking, hands moving. Today he is looking for clues, treating his own notebook as any primary source.

He starts at the beginning, though entries jump back and forward wherever there’s space, and he could never hope to find a real chronological order. But nearer the start of the book, he’s drawn more _things_. Cats and cars and kings and crows, with the odd person trapped inbetween. First he’s just noting where they are, but then he begins to look at the faces, really look, trying to find someone he has known.

Some of them look quite alike. Some of them are the same person. Co-incidentally, those are the ones Gansey has no recollection of drawing. It’s a boy about his age, sometimes anxious, sometimes smiling, usually with a mark on his face that needs quite a few repetitions before Gansey realises it isn’t just dirt on the page.

He studies the way his own hand drew the features, uncertain of why he drew this boy so much when he doesn’t even know him, not sure if it’s Noah but not knowing who else it would be.

The unsettling part is the care in the drawings. Gansey knows himself, and he knows how these drawings were done, and there’s something about them that’s – loving. No other word for it.  

He doesn’t know what to make of that.

 

For a while, that’s all they have to work with. Sketches and notes and a first name, and the sensation that there is maybe, somehow, something missing. Gansey is afraid that’s wishful thinking, artificial loss, because wouldn’t it be nicer if they still somehow knew?  

 

Blue comes to him with a stack of polaroids, excited and scared in equal, electric measure.

“I took these months ago,” she says, “And I thought – I thought they were just the four of us messing about, so I didn’t look at them when you said Noah, but I found them last night, and – just look!”

Gansey looks. Gansey sees himself sprawled dramatically across his leather sofa while Ronan flips off Blue and her polaroid camera. He sees Adam and Ronan playing pool, looking unnecessarily intent. He sees Blue taking a selfie. And then he sees the boy just behind her; the pale, smudgy one.

He looks like all of Gansey’s sketches, and he looks about as faded in photos as he had in pencil. But he is very much _there_ , present in the room, the four of them making space for him, and Gansey lets out a breathy little laugh as Blue hands them over.

Her stack of photos is not tall, but Noah’s in half of them, flitting around the edges, occasionally laughing with Ronan, occasionally posing with Blue, but mostly, mostly at Gansey’s side.

The one Gansey looks at for longest shows Noah hanging off his shoulders, eyes bright, smile cheeky. There’s something about the way he’s looking at Gansey, and something about the way Gansey’s arm is around Noah’s waist. They’re standing very close together.

Gansey scrapes the inside of his skull raw, and cannot find a single memory.

“Aglionby uniform,” he notes, voice a little hoarse with something else. “I’m sure you’ll believe that I don’t know a single ‘Noah’ in our year?”

“You’ll look at the school records, though,” Blue says. Her excitement is as muted as his; it’s an incredible find, and it’s left them both cold under the skin. Noah in the photos is soft and fading, but he looks _happy_ , and neither of them recognize him at all. The puzzle is becoming a lot less fun to solve.

 

There is no ‘Noah’ in Gansey’s year, or the year below, despite him looking about their age. What Gansey does find, when he searches Aglionby’s student records for the name, are a few dark-haired alumni from years past, and a small note from seven years ago, that says Noah Czerny is unable to graduate as he is still missing.

‘Missing’, the careful word in the carefully chosen font, as the school tries to artfully tell parents that one of their son’s classmates has probably died.

Yet there he is in Gansey’s polaroids, ageless and present and attempting snooker with Ronan. Gansey sits in the little corner of the Aglionby archive that he was granted access to, and tries to understand. Had they been haunted? Was it a trick of light and time and memory? A collective hallucination, or an elaborate prank from his friends to give him something to do? Gansey is a person who believes in ghosts, and that is the word that catches better than any other, the most plausible of a totally implausible set of possibilities.

But then, why forget him?

 

It takes seven years after a disappearance to declare someone dead; maybe Noah’s time was up.

 

There is little mention of Noah in the year that he disappeared, because the case was unsolved, because no one wanted to be the one to suggest maybe he wasn’t coming back. But only a few months ago an anonymous tip called in the location of his corpse, and along with the memorial, Aglionby gave him a glossy page in the yearbook.

It’s a book that Gansey owns, and he opens it in Monmouth, flanked by Adam and Ronan and Blue, each of them as unsettled by the truth of Noah as they are by the void he left. There in full colour, Noah Czerny’s school photo, grin dazzling against an uninspired blue background.

For a moment, and only a moment, it is exciting – they found him, from scraps and fragments and footnotes, from a shadow in a photograph, from the space he left behind, they actually managed to track him down. Here is proof that he was real and died, here is proof that he was a person, and that whatever inhabits old photos and notes, it could only have been a shade.

Noah’s school photo doesn’t even look that much like the Noah that Gansey had been drawing; this one is flush with life, but now that he has seen them both, it’s clear as day that the one Gansey knew was dead, was pale, was sallow and sick, even if his smile was -

Gansey looks away from the page, exhilaration souring all at once. This is not a great and distant, long-dead king. This is a boy. This is – was? – his friend. There’s one polaroid he never returned to Blue, the one with the boy laughing, pale and shining, ephemeral, unreal.

Gansey thinks he looks radiant.

 

He’s tired. Everyone’s tired. Whatever Noah was, there is the prevalent feeling that he no longer _is_ , and the remaining clues are finite. Gansey thinks _just one more find_ , like there’s a missing piece that will let him rest, like he doesn’t know himself better than that by now.

It is too hard to believe that Noah existed in his life and has been scoured away. It’s too hard to think of the boy in those pictures was his friend, was part of his quest, was that _close_ to him, and was reduced to nothing. Seven years dead, but there is a picture of them side-by-side that makes Gansey’s heart hurt.

He doesn’t want to think he could dishonour someone’s memory like that.

 

The last thing he finds is a draft of a letter, crammed between the bed and the wall in Monmouth’s spare room.

No names, but it’s half-finished and in his own handwriting. Gansey’s roundabout, overcomplicated writing strangles the meaning. There is a poem, one of his own, and accordingly awful. There is _feeling_ , occasionally glimpsed through his poor phrasing, something raw and sincere, enough that Gansey feels robbed for not knowing it.

It reads like a confession, but he doesn’t remember writing it, and he doesn’t remember who it’s for.

It probably belongs in the ‘Noah’ collection.

It’s easier to pretend he never found it.

**Author's Note:**

> not to ruin the mood or anything but I couldn't find an artful way to work in that [this is Gansey's penholder](http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/products/zoom/1543_executive_knight_pen_holder.jpg) and it's very important that everyone know
> 
> thanks for reading as always, I love hearing from people here or on [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/)


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